No Dig No Weed Gardening - Garlic

Gardening without digging and weeding sounds a bit unlikely. A bit like smoking without inhaling, you wonder what else there is?  But with a little planning you can make your gardening life easier, avoiding that back breaking digging and  tedious weeding. I'm all in favour of spending less garden  time digging and weeding and more  in the deck chair. If I had a deck chair that is.

We use enough garlic around here to keep Christopher Lee cowering in a corner, so really, I should plant it in late Autumn. More or less as soon as you've gathered one year's crop, you can decide which cloves will make good seed garlic for next year, and get them in as soon as you have a spare space.  Always pick the fattest cloves for replanting, and with a mixture of natural selection and gardener's selection, you will improve your seed stock year on year, eventually producing almost your own variety, perfectly suited to your own soil and your particular climate. You can do this with many crops of course, provided you don't use modern F1 hybrid seeds, which don't breed true, but with garlic it's particularly easy because the bit you eat also happens to be  the bit you plant.  

For such a mediterranean crop you'd think they would suffer in the average freezing cold wet English winter, but not a bit of it. They sit there in the ground all winter, putting down good roots, and then in the spring they happily shoot up, apparently none the worse.

But for the last two years, I find January arriving and the garlic is still not in the ground. Oh dear. Happily last year was a very good growing year, and my crop was still excellent, - if you don't get good results make sure that weeds are not the culprit  spoiling your crop. Because it's a long season crop it's very easy to plant garlic and forget it, and before you know it the bed is full of weeds which are awkward and time consuming to get out, and if you don't get them out you will drastically reduce the crop. Ask me how I know.

Anyway, before any more of my garlic found its way into winey beef casseroles or ground onto crusty bread, I thought I'd take the opportunity afforded by a day or two of watery winter sun to plant out this year's crop.

They're very quick to plant if you already have established raised beds - just select a nice weed free area,  lay out the cloves in rows using a bamboo cane as a guide - mine were about 6 inches apart, and about a foot between the rows, and when you're happy with the layout just go along the rows planting them with your trowel so that the top of the clove is just covered with soil  Raised beds are best because you can work from the sides, - walking on the soil at this time of year compacts and damages its structure  I don't dig my established beds at all any more, adding as much organic matter as I can during the year seems to keep it in good heart, and not treading on it with my size sevens in the winter  helps maintain structure and drainage. If you're starting from scratch with a new garden, you will need to get rid of the nastier perennial weeds like ground elder first, but if you're thorough this is a one time dig.

Straight rows look nicer and make weeding easier, but I've reduced this job to a minimum here as the garlic bed is the first to receive the many offerings from the lawn mower in our garden. The garlic will be growing well by the time you start cutting the grass, so use the first lawn mowings to mulch the garlic bed, making sure you cover every inch of visible earth with the mowings. The grass gradually rots down and enriches the soil, smothering weed seedlings at the same time. Keep it topped up during the year and you'll be feeding your crop, enriching your soil, and saving yourself all that tedious weeding at the same time. Oh and if it turns out to be a humdinger of a summer it will also cut down on watering needs too.

Maybe this year I'll treat myself to a deck chair.

The Great Scape

No that's not a typo for the Steve McQueen film, the scape I refer to is the great garlic scape, which looks like a kind of curly spring onion

I posted about this last year, but make no apologies for repeating myself, as it seems garlic scapes are still much undervalued, and not appreciated for the delicious treat that they are. Some people have been known to cut them off and throw them away! (Throw up hands in horror)

If you grow hardneck garlic, variously known as porcelain, or rocambole garlic, it will produce, around this time of year, a curious curly central shoot, which is in fact the flowering stem of the plant. I know of no other allium either edible or ornamental that does this curly wurly thing, it seems to be only porcelain garlic. My variety is "Music" and I have grown it for several years, saving a few heads each year for replanting. We eat a lot of garlic, I believe the allium veggies are very beneficial for health if not social life, and this year I've bought hardly any garlic at all, using our own supplies until well into the spring, with a bit of a gap until the scapes come into season, and tide us over until garlic harvest proper in August.

You need to cut off the scape for the benefit of the plant, so that it can direct its energies into plumping up the bulbs rather than producing flowers and seed. So cut your scapes, take them into the kitchen and chop off the flower buds at the end, and make yourself some Garlic Scape Pesto. This is a loose recipe, and endlessly variable, but here's the general idea.

Garlic Scape Pesto

6-8 garlic scapes

two handfuls of walnuts

2-4oz/50-100gr parmesan or similar hard cheese

handful of flatleaf parsley or basil if you prefer

Salt and black pepper

a good half pint of extra virgin olive oil

Cut the end off the scapes and chop into 1inch pieces.

Chop the cheese into manageable (for the blender) cubes.

Put everything except the oil into the blender and blend until finely chopped, at which point add as much oil as you fancy, to make a thick paste. Keep it in the fridge in a jar, floating a little oil over the top to keep the air out. Use it for:

Spreading on toasted sourdough and topping with sliced tomato for bruschetta style nibbles.

Stir into cooked pasta for a quick tasty supper when you've had a long day in the garden and don't want to cook much.

Spread on chops, chicken thighs, and/or chunky veggies, and slam in the aga to be cooking whilst you shower away the vestiges of the day's gardening, emerging Stepford fragrant, twenty minutes later to serve dinner.

I can hear someone laughing...

garlic scapes

I've been growing garlic for a few years now, and I find if you plant it early enough it's pretty easy to get a good crop. Last year I grew the variety "Music" and it kept me in garlic for most of the year, with loads to give away as well. It's what's known as a hardneck variety or sometimes called porcelain garlic; it's said to be the best flavour, but not the best keeper.
I harvested it in August I think, last year and it lasted well into the new year, but then it gets that little green shoot in the middle that you have to poke out with your knife because it tastes a bit bitter. I find most garlic from the shops goes like that though, so it's not so much of a hardship to do, especially when it means your garlic supply is free. And this year it's doubly free because I kept about a dozen or so heads for replanting this year. I put them in last Autumn, in late September and they are looking good so far.
One interesting thing about hardneck garlic is that it produces what are known as "scapes" - a peculiar looking curly shoot which is really the flowering shoot and must be removed to allow the plant to concentrate it's energies into the bulb and not into flowering. If you grow onions, you might be forgiven for thinking that your garlic had "bolted" but this is the normal growth habit for this plant and the scapes can be used for a number of gourmet treats. They can be steamed and served with melted butter like asparagus, but the best way to enjoy their fresh flavour is to make them into a pesto. Just chop the scapes into pieces and throw into the food processor with some olive oil, parmesan cheese and pine nuts. You can adjust quantiities to your taste. The pesto keeps in a jar in the fridge for ages and is delicious with pasta as well as spread on bruschetta with a glass of wine before dinner and also perks up plain grilled chicken or chops.
Oh and they're also good added to a stiry fry. If you want to try garlic scapes you'll probably have to grow your own as I've never seen them in the shops, or maybe find a garlic growing friend - I always have more than I can use.